Various reading interests about the past, present and future (concise form)

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Various reading interests about the past, present and future (concise form)

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Here's a thread of short reading with various interests, in concise forms. Nevertheless there won't be any pop news such as regarding the celebs (Lady Gaga/Britney Spears/Justin Bieber/Justin Timberlake and the like ), Hollywood trivias and the kinds. All the readings come from the public sources, so one may read further at the source.

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Edward Louis Bernays: The Father of Public Relations and Propaganda

Edward Louis Bernays (November 22, 1891 – March 9, 1995) was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and opinion making or propaganda. Born 1891 in Vienna to Jewish parents, Bernays was a double nephew of psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud. His mother was Sigmund's sister Anna and his father was Ely Bernays, brother of Freud's wife Martha Bernays.

Note that the term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things.

His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn't smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.

Here is what may have been the locker room words of a coach of a national badminton team going into the Sudirman/Uber Cup, speaking about a rival team against whom they are about to play: (which country does it describe?)

They are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution...They are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond thier judgment...They are swift to follow up a success and slow to recoil from a reverse.

Their bodies they spend ungrudgingly in their country's cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in her service. A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss. The deficiency created by the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes; for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the speed with which they act upon their resolutions.

Their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands. One might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others. Such is your antagonist.

In reality it is a speech about Athens written circa 400 BC.
(They would of kicked butt in the BWF!)

China might become the first space-faring nation with quantum communication capability, as it has announced plans to launch its “Chinese Quantum Science Satellite" in 2016, MIT Technology Review reported.

Today, thanks to quantum cryptography, secure messages can be sent from one location on the planet to another. However, this is just possible over distances of 100 kilometres or so, through optical fibre or the atmosphere.

Back in 2012, Chinese physicists tried to set up a new record, but finally were the Europeans the ones that were able to send information through a quantum channel over 150 kilometres through the atmosphere.

Now, Chinese made a new step. PAN Jian-Wei at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai and his colleagues bounced single photons off an orbiting satellite and detected them back on our planet.

Chinese scientists achieved this by pointed at a satellite orbiting at an altitude of 400 km with two telescopes in a binocular formation. The satellite is covered with reflectors which bounce signals from Earth back from their original location.

Pan and his team say that they were able to detect the returning photons at a rate of about 600 per second. "These results are suf?cient to set up an unconditionally secure QKD link between satellite and earth, technically," they explained.

Despite the team made the discovery in 2010, they decided to publish their paper now to also announced the launch of the Chinese Quantum Science Satellite, the first quantum science experiment into space, in three years.

Pan and his colleagues aim to establish a quantum communication network between Beijing and Vienna, meaning that Europe, which is also planning to send these kind of communications to the International Space Station, might have to cooperate with its “rivals.”

philosophyofmetrics

This site is very insightful for reading pleasure, i suggest BCers to look around there to find the piece that fits your reading taste. I just stumbled across it quite recently, yet i immediately feel its charm
take a look at UST; The Artificial Womb; The Pop Culture Bubble; and so forth.

"Philosophy of Metrics is the methodology of understanding the world through patterns and processes. From the ancient philosophy of primitive man to the stock market today, there is a pattern in everything and anything. We but need to observe and recognize the macro and micro of it all.

One of the biggest patterns is the one of ignorance. We are subjected daily to methods of misdirection and direct obfuscation which serve to keep us blind to the realities that surround us.

Our modest intent is to lift the fog on the mysteries and allow some of these patterns to become visible, whereby we may better understand the world and our place within it." - http://philosophyofmetrics.com/about/

GMO Myths and Truths, 2nd edition (free online download)

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GMO Myths and Truths

The second edition of GMO Myths and Truths, co-authored by genetic engineers Dr John Fagan and Dr Michael Antoniou and researcher Claire Robinson, has been published as a free online download by the sustainability and science policy platform Earth Open Source.

John Fagan, one of the report’s authors, said:

“The GMO debate is far from being over, as some GMO proponents claim. Instead the evidence of risk and actual harm from GM foods and crops to health and the environment has grown in the two years since we brought out the first edition. The good news is that GMOs are not needed to feed the world. The report shows that there are far better ways of ensuring a safe and sustainable food supply.”

Monsanto Double Standards and the Crumbling “Scientific Myths” of the GMO Biotech

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Read also this article about GMO.

Monsanto Double Standards and the Crumbling “Scientific Myths” of the GMO Biotech Sector

By Colin Todhunter
Global Research, May 19, 2014

The GMO biotech sector is involved in a multi-pronged campaign to influence governments and the public about the benefits of its products. It uses various means.

It sets up or infiltrates institutions and co-opts prominent political and scientific figures to do its bidding (1).

It hijacks regulatory and policy making bodies (2,3).

[...]

When is good science bad science and bad science good science? When the industry says so

In 2012, a study led by Professor Gilles Seralini called into question the safety of GMOs and Round Up herbicide. The paper that conveyed the results was last year retracted by a prestigious scientific journal (11). The publisher of Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT), Elsevier, has now compelled the journal editor A. Wallace Hayes to publish a right of reply by the Séralini team.

According to the Séralini team, the editor of FCT uses double standards when it comes to publishing in favour of the industry. Hayes retracted the study despite the fact that he found neither fraud nor conscious misinterpretation. In a new article published in FCT, the scientists explain why they do not accept his conclusion. They denounce the lack of scientific validity of the reasons given for the retraction, explain why the Sprague-Dawley rat strain used is appropriate and describe the statistical results in depth concerning the blood and urine parameters affected, proving that the liver and kidney pathologies and the mammary tumours are solidly based.

Hayes justified his retraction by arguing that it is impossible to conclude a link between GMO and cancer, even though the word cancer was never used in the paper. Not all the tumours were cancers but they nevertheless brought death through internal haemorrhages and compressions of vital organs. Hayes also argued that ten rats per group, of the Sprague-Dawley strain, did not allow the level of statistical strength to conclude about the toxicity of the GMO and Roundup. But FCT has published two studies (Hammond & al., 2004; and Zhang & al., 2014) measuring the same number of rats of the same strain, without calling into question the strength of the statistics, let alone their conclusion – that the GMOs tested were safe.

The recent study by Zhang et al, like the study by Séralini et al, measures the potential chronic effects of the consumption of a GMO (transgenic rice producing a modified Bt insecticide). It uses the same strain and measures the same number of rats. The only substantive difference was in the results: Zhang and colleagues concluded that the GMO under test was safe.

Professor Séralini says:

“We are forced to conclude that the decision to withdraw our paper was based on unscientific double standards applied by the editor. These double standards can only be explained by pressure from the GMO and agrochemical industry to force acceptance of GMOs and Roundup. The most flagrant illustration is the appointment of Richard Goodman, a former Monsanto employee, onto the FCT editorial board, soon after the publication of the NK603 study. Worse, this pro-industry bias also affects regulatory authorities, such as EFSA (European Food Safety Authority), which gives favourable opinions on risky products based on mediocre studies commissioned by the companies wishing to commercialize the products, as well as systematically dismissing the findings of independent scientists which cast doubt on their safety.”

Genetically modified crops and foods are neither safe nor necessary to feed the world

The link between the usd interest rate and oil price stability

.Where does capital really come from?

Most US policymakers believe that capital comes from debt issued by the Fed and its member banks; most other big debtor countries agree (i.e. Japan). On the other hand, policymakers of the world’s biggest creditor nations (led by China) believe that real capital is the surplus produced from production and trade (which has been mainly accumulated in US dollars and ultimately backs the US dollar as the primary reserve currency).

For the past 7-12 years the two conflicting ideas about capital have begun to have noticeable effects in certain global asset markets. The chart below, showing gold, oil, and Fed Funds rates, illustrates what has occurred. For most of the three decades from 1973-2002, these asset classes traded closely together; in the last decade, they have been diverging dramatically. We’ll explain why this happened and the critical implications it holds for the USD prices of oil and gold.

Renminbi internationalisation accelerates

.Renminbi internationalisation accelerates

Channel News Asia carried an article last week titled, "Yuan clearing on the rise". In this article, it was reported that "the Chinese yuan (RMB) is increasingly used in international trade and Singapore is the second-largest international offshore centre for yuan trading and investments." The Singapore branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC Singapore) reported that it cleared 21 trillion yuan worth of trade and financial transactions in the first 8 months of 2014 alone.

A quick search on the Internet with the keyword 'yuan clearing' also yielded a slew of articles reporting on the onset of yuan clearing activities around the world - all happening in this month, September 2014. On 15 September, it was reported that Paris is now an offshore renminbi (RMB) center after the People's Bank of China (PBOC) signed an MOU with the French central bank which authorised the Bank of China (BOC) as a clearing bank for RMB business in the French capital.

On 16 September, a similar MOU was signed between the PBOC and Luxembourg's central bank which saw the ICBC branch in Luxembourg appointed as the clearing bank for RMB business for the European country. Paris and Luxembourg now join London and Frankfurt as European RMB clearing centers. London and Frankfurt had seen payments in yuan more than doubled in the year through July after yuan clearing activities commenced.

At the recently Singapore-held RMB Internationalisation Summit, Singapore's central banker Mr Liong Sing Chiong said that the creation of offshore reminbi centers in Europe "will take the entire RMB internationalisation exercise to a different phase". He believed that this development sends a strong signal to companies to assess how they can tap into the Chinese currency for their investment needs.

China's ambitions for the renminbi on the global stage was summed up by the conference's keynote speaker, Mr Ma Jun who is the People's Bank of China's Chief Economist. He said that in the long term "RMB internationalisation implies a more diversified global reserve currency system".